USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 5
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In Vermont, where the Evangelicals threatened to become dominant, the tide was turned in the direction of old-time high churchmanship through the election of John Henry Hopkins as Bishop. He barred revivals, prayer meetings, black gowns and other insignia of the Evangelicals. After two long episcopates, Vermont then turned to the newer high churchmanship of the Anglo-Catholics in the administration of Arthur C. A. Hall.
At this time, Maine was strongly Evangelical under George Burgess, first bishop of the Diocese. In the 1870s the Maine dele- gation to General Convention voted solidly to condemn the new Anglo-Catholic party in the Church. Now Anglo-Catholicism dom- inates the Diocese.
New Hampshire under Carlton Chase, who had led the anti- Evangelical movement in Vermont, was to remain old-time high Church in the long episcopate of William Woodruff Niles. Only in the last thirty-five years have men of a catholic or liberal variety transformed New Hampshire's theology.
Connecticut, on the whole, stayed by the old moorings of Sea- bury churchmanship. Not that Evangelicals were unknown. Kewley, later of St. George's, New York, the converter to the Church of the future Evangelical bishop of Rhode Island, J. P. K. Henshaw, as well as Philander Chase, George Burgess and Thomas M. Clark, future bishops of Ohio, Maine and Rhode Island, all held important parishes in Connecticut. Today, Connecticut reflects all the manifold variations of Episcopal churchmanship.
When Bishop Griswold died suddenly on February 15, 1843, on the doorstep of his assistant bishop, Manton Eastburn, an era in the New England dioceses was over and a still greater era was to begin. During his episcopate all the theological currents of the past had flowed. Soon the new currents of the future were to become visible. Numerically, the Church in New England had made vast strides, greater by far than the increases of a burgeoning population. After
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Griswold's day, still greater advances were to be made. Today, Episcopalians, in proportion to population, are twice as numerous in New England as in the country as a whole. In this little corner of the country are a good eighth of all the Churchmen in the United States.
Bishop Griswold, his second wife and her young son are all buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Dedham, hard by route 1 A. Some years after his wife's death, a public subscription put a siz- able monument over their remains. Bishop Eastburn is buried near them.
What did his own contemporaries think of Bishop Griswold and his work ? We can find the answer in the memorial resolutions voted by the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Conventions of 1843.
In the 1843 Massachusetts Convention, a memorial "Report" was presented on the late Bishop. One paragraph reads :
"While we deeply feel the loss that we have sustained, and sincerely sympathize with the mourning family and relatives of the deceased in their affliction, our hearts are filled with gratitude to the great Head of the Church, for having raised up, and for so many years continued to us, one who, in appearance and character, in learning and in charity, in humility and devotion to his Master's cause, was so well qualified for the station in which he was placed, and to whom, under God, we are indebted for so much of the pros- perity and increase with which we have been blessed."
The Rhode Island Convention of 1843 added eloquently: "Re- solved that the prosperity of the Church within the limits of the Eastern Diocese may be ascribed mainly to the gracious influences which the life and character of our venerated Diocesan shed upon clergy and laity, and, through them, upon society at large; - to the scrupulous fidelity with which he performed all the duties of the Episcopal office ; - to his extensive acquisitions in theological learn- ing, consecrated as were these acquisitions to the highest service of God and man; - to the extraordinary ability with which he preach- ed the Gospel of Jesus Christ - never erring, either through excess or defect, in his statements of scriptural truth - never severing faith from good works - never encouraging a treacherous hope - never leaving true penitence to suffer, without assurance of pardon, the agonies of a wounded spirit; - and, above all, to the daily beauty of his Christian life; - to the quiet and unostentatious dili- gence, with which he did whatsoever his hand found to do; and to that earnest yet chastened piety which was the habitat of his soul.
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"Resolved, that we, the clergy and laity of the Diocese of Rhode Island, are not without special reasons for lamenting the departure from this life of our most excellent Diocesan, for here were passed many of the years alloted to his laborious and effective ministry ; here his kind affections flowed out upon familiar and constant friends ; and here he is freshly remembered by thousands, who loved to catch from his lips, now sealed forever, the accents of everlasting life."
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CHAPTER V. The Days of Bishop Eastburn 1843 - 1872
Manton Eastburn was born in Leeds, England, on February 9, 1801, becoming bishop of Massachusetts immediately after his forty-second birthday. He was the fourth bishop out of forty in the American Church to have been born outside the American Colonies in the British Empire.
Manton Eastburn came to America as a young man and re- ceived his training in the country of his adoption. He was an early student at the General Theological Seminary in New York. Unlike his classmate, George Washington Doane, later Bishop of New Jersey, Eastburn was a sturdy Evangelical, who clung to his views with bulldog tenacity. His Convention addresses are sprinkled not only with the characteristic phrases of Evangelical piety, but also with animadversions against "medieval mummeries" posing as true religion. His controversy with the rectors of the Church of the Advent in Boston is a part of American Church history. Since the Bishop refused to visit the parish unless candles, crosses and flowers were eliminated, and the solid altar was changed to a "Lord's Table," the various rectors had to take their candidates elsewhere for Con- firmation. When one rector once apologized for the smallness of his class, the Bishop replied, whether seriously or jovially, that, con- sidering the instruction received, the smaller the class the better. Bishop Eastburn never visited the Church of the Advent until a new canon of the General Church, apparently aimed at him, made an Episcopal visit once in three years mandatory. Even then, he took occasion to reprove the parish for its "Popish proclivities."
On another occasion, the Bishop visited the new low-church parish of Grace Church in Newton, where Peter Henry Steenstra, later to be the Biblical professor in the new Cambridge Seminary, was rector. He espied two vases of flowers put on the Lord's Table in honor of his visit. The Bishop immediately thought of an in- genious way inconspicuously to remove them. As he and the rector knelt to pray, each one took a vase to the floor with him. If Manton Eastburn could have foreseen the dangerous "rationalism" which the young rector was later to disseminate, one wonders whether he would have ordained him.
For a number of years, Manton Eastburn was rector of the Church of the Ascension in New York, a strongly Evangelical parish first of the older and then the newer variety. In 1842, he was elected rector of Trinity Church, Boston, and consecrated on December 29, 1842, as assistant and successor to Bishop Griswold. In six weeks he was bishop in his own right. Bishop Eastburn remained rector of Trinity until late 1868. An assistant, paid from the income of the "Greene Foundation," relieved him of much of the parish work, less heavy in those days than now. Episcopal visitations, in East- burn's time, were made usually in the summer season, the number
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of parishes, though steadily increasing, being much fewer than at present. Eastburn's successor at Trinity Church on Summer Street, now the heart of the Boston business district, was the young Phillips Brooks. Fortunately for the future of Trinity, the great fire of 1872 made it possible for the parish to move to its present Back Bay location, where mountains of fill, brought in by the Boston and Albany Railroad, had changed tidal waters to solid ground. Shortly before this, Emmanuel Church had begun its career on the new ground, nearer, however, to the old city.
II.
The episcopate of Manton Eastburn marks another milestone in the history of the Massachusetts Diocese. Although the ten-fold increase in communicants of the thirty-six years of Bishop Griswold was not repeated (400 to 4,000), nevertheless, a three-fold increase in numbers occured, a growth much larger than that of the popula- tion, despite the rapidly increasing number of Roman Catholics.
To be more specific : Communicants in 1848 were 4,635; in 1858, 7,702; in 1872, 11,551, with 11,108 in Sunday Schools. Contribu- tions had reached the impressive total of $450,000 for parish ex- penses and $125,000 for extra-parochial giving, a better total, comparatively, than, say, the $4,760,000 of 1954, even when this is reinforced by the $1,411,000 of the western Diocese. The 11,551 Communicants of 1870 gave a per capita average of over $50 a year, when the dollar bought many times as much as today. In 1954, some 100,000 Communicants in the two dioceses contributed an average of about $60 each to the work of the Church, less considerable money from endowments. In other words, Episcopalians, in 1870, gave the equivalent of possibly $500 apiece in present day money. This would seem to indicate that Masachusetts Churchmen of ninety years ago, even allowing for taxes, were not only more generous than now, but had a higher proportion of the higher incomes.
In the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, the proportion of Epis- copalians to Massachusetts population rose from 1 in 128 to 1 in 103. In the country as a whole, the rise was from 1 in 235 to 1 in 166. From 1870 to 1910, Massachusetts, like the rest of New England, grew churchwise faster than the population, despite enormous Roman increase. While the national average in 1950 was 1 communicant in 92, the New England average is less than half of that.
Where and how did the phenomenal growth of the Church in the Eastburn episcopate take place ? More by the emergence of new parishes than by increase in the older ones. Thus the eight Boston parishes of 1843 had 1,701 communicants between them. In 1870, they had only 1,755. On the other hand, the establishment of six more in the enlarged Boston area account for 1,900 additional com-
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municants, the total city rise being from 1,701 to 3,697. A new parish in the old area, the Church of the Advent, now St. John the Evangelist, was the largest in the city, with 650 communicants. This parish had no pew rents; other parishes gathered mostly those who could and would buy or rent pews.
The second largest new parish was Emmanuel Church on New- bury Street, near the east edge of the newly-filled Back Bay. It counted 500 Communicants. Its rector was Frederic Dan Hunting- ton, former Unitarian, and professor and chaplain at Harvard. Huntington, like William Ellery Channing, was a Biblical Unitarian. He did not read Calvinism into the New Testament nor reject the divinity of Christ. Following the New Testament texts, he made the Son subordinate to the Father. But when the second phase of the Unitarian movement came along, with its creed of "The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man and the Leadership of Jesus Christ," he resigned his Harvard post and sought refuge, like the parents of Phillips Brooks and others, in the Episcopal Church. In 1870, however, cultured Boston was still chiefly Unitarian. One of the accomplishments of Phillips Brooks was to make it much less so. After some years at Emmanuel, Huntington was for thirty-five years bishop of Central New York (1869-1904).
Other new parishes and their communicants were St. Mark's (300) and St. Mary's (234), in Dorchester, St. Mary's for Sailors (138) and the Church of the Messiah in the south end, later to move to the expanding Back Bay near Symphony Hall. These last two parishes are now no more, and the Dorchester parishes have declined over the years.
When we turn to the older parishes outside of Boston, we find only a limited growth. Christ Church, Quincy, advanced from the 70 of 1843 to the 174 of 1870. St. Paul's, Dedham, rose from 40 to 184 under the long rectorship of Samuel B. Babcock. The other parishes of the South Shore remained more or less static.
Along the North Shore gains likewise were small. St. Paul's, Newburyport, rose from 112 to 180, St. Peter's, Salem, fell from 142 to only 100, though a new parish in the town had appeared, Grace Church, with 137 Communicants. St. Michael's, Marblehead, had declined from 100 to 80. St. James, Amesbury advanced from 24 to 80, and St. Luke's, Chelsea, from 39 to 152, and St. Stephen's, Lynn, from 30 to 127. This parish, named originally Christ Church, had lost its first building by a mortgage foreclosure and had re- organized as St. Stephen's. Heavy Canadian immigration and in- dustrialization were to lift the parish eventually into the 2,000- communicant class.
Turning to the area west of Boston, we find that old Christ Church, Cambridge, in the long rectorship of Nicholas Hoppin, had grown from 43 Communicants to 178, and new St. Peter's, a mile and a half down Massachusetts Avenue toward Boston from
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Harvard Square, from 15 to 212. Recently also, a new parish, St. James, with 52 Communicants, had been established among the gardens and pastures of North Cambridge. St. John's, the new chapel of the Episcopal Theological School on Brattle Street had become a quasi-parish, ministering to students and to some 60 local Communicants. Its Dean was John Seely Stone, who, thirty years previous, had been rector of St. Paul's, Boston.
St. John's, Charlestown, had climbed from 105 Communicants to 363, with 278 in Sunday School. Later, Philo W. Sprague and Walcott Cutler were to have long and socially-minded ministries in that section of Boston. In 1957, St. John's had only 82 Communi- cants.
St. Mary's, Newton Lower Falls, still remained a static parish, the 126 Communicants of 1843 rising to only 151 in 1870. However, a new parish, Grace Church, Newton Center, with 102 Communi- cants had appeared in this suburb of Boston. Newton, now a city of 80,000 has eight Episcopal parishes, with 4,400 Communicants, or 1 in 18 of the population.
To the southeast of Boston, the Church had suffered a decline. St. Andrew's, Hanover, had fallen from 129 to 70, little Marshfield had temporarily disappeared, and Trinity, Bridgewater, had sagged from 59 to 27. All three parishes were to have a great growth in the last generation, as did also colonial Christ Church, Quincy.
In Bristol County, the older parishes were expanding, thanks to the textile boom, though new ones were still mostly in the future. Old St. Thomas, Taunton, had raised its membership from 107 to 219. A new little parish of 38 Communicants, St. John's had ap- peared in the north of the city. Today, with a local population of 40,000, these two parishes count 830 Communicants between them, holding close to the diocesan average of 1 Episcopalian Communi- cant to 43 people. Grace Church, New Bedford, had doubled its membership from 100 to 212. The Church of the Ascension in Fall River, had climbed from 77 to 161, with a Sunday School of 337, big with promise for the future.
In Worcester County, significant changes had occurred. In 1843, only the mill-village parishes at Wilkinsonville and Rochdale upheld the Episcopal banner. In 1870, they were still small, with 53 and 42 Communicants apiece. On the other hand, All Saints Church, with 260 Communicants and 288 in Sunday School, had arisen in growing Worcester. Its rector was the young William R. Huntington, one of the rising Broad Churchmen of the day, who was later to become the rector of Grace Church in New York, and "the first presbyter of the American Church." Huntington, before he left Worcester, had given the impetus to the founding of four of the five other parishes of the city. The fifth, St. Michael's in the north end, arose about 1930. Worcester is now a city of 201,000
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people. Its 3,800 Episcopal Communicants are only 1 in 53 of its population, reflecting the late entrance of the Episcopal Church into Central Massachusetts.
New parishes in this central area were Trinity, Milford, and St. John's, Millville. The first now has 325 Communicants and the second about 100, a number maintained, on the average, for over a century. Milford remained small, until the development of the Draper Textile Machinery Works in neighboring Hopedale, after 1870, brought new people.
Christ Church, Fitchburg, also sprang up in this area. Cotton mills and later woolen mills arising by the banks of the swift-flowing Nashua river gave the town its industrial start. These now have nearly all gone, but several large paper mills remain and diversified small industry has taken the place of cotton. In 1870, Christ Church counted only 100 Communicants. In 1957, they numbered 1,107. Christ Church, with its daughter parish, the Church of the Good Shepherd in West Fitchburg, accounts for 1 in 34 of the 42,000 people of the city. Episcopalians are stronger numerically in Fitch- burg than in any other important place in the diocese of Western Massachusetts.
Farther west in the State, we may note significant increases in communicant strength - in Springfield, 83 to 255; in Northampton, 40 to 83; in Greenfield 65 to 119; in Great Barrington, 82 to 122; in Stockbridge from 21 to 55; in Pittsfield from 66 to 125. The other older parishes, like Lanesborough, Ashfield, Otis and Van Deusenville had either remained static or declined. Lenox was to have a future with a later numerical decline. New York visitors and near-by proximity to industrial Pittsfield account for its 185 communicants of today. The growth of the Episcopal Church in western Massachusetts, as elsewhere, came chiefly with the growth of cities.
The greatest increase in the number of new churches in the Eastburn episcopate took place in the near vicinity of Boston. Be- side the half-dozen already mentioned, we may list a score more.
Somerville, now a city of 102,000 people, in 1870, was still largely rural. The beginnings of the Episcopal Church there were facilitated by the migration of many people from New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. In 1870, the Church had two parishes, Emmanuel, on a hill near the Cambridge line, and St. Thomas on Union Square. Emmanuel Church had 64 communicants in 1870, and 59 in 1957, although numbers have been much higher in the intervening eighty years. St. Thomas Church had 110 communicants in 1870, and 208 in 1957, although the parish has reported as many as 400 in the past. New parishes since the East- burn era are Christ Church on the Fellsway, with 262 communi- cants, the only one to grow over the years, and St. James on Claren- don Hill, which in 1957 listed 213 communicants, a considerable
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decline over the last forty years. Somerville's 842 communicants of 1957 are not even 1 in 110 of the city's population. Here, as in Charlestown, the steady march of the sons of Rome has been marked by the slow retreat of the sons of Canterbury.
The year 1870 saw new parishes in Malden (42 communicants), Medford (93), Milford (48), Millville (108), Amherst (77), Brighton (50), and St. Paul's, Brookline (85). Amos A. Lawrence and William R. Lawrence, the father and uncle of the future bishop, William Lawrence, attended here and later William R. Lawrence built a chapel near their estates, now known as the Church of Our Saviour, Longwood. For years, St. Paul's, Brookline, remained small. Later, All Saints, Brookline, where Dudley Dulaney Addison was rector for a generation, came into being.
To illustrate Church growth in the areas immediately beyond Boston, twelve parishes, describing an arc from Waltham through Wrentham, Woods Hole and Weymouth had in 1870, between them, 488 communicants; in 1950, 4,706, with large increase since.
Other new parishes in the Boston area were: Calvary, Danvers (70) ; St. John's, Gloucester, (42) ; St. John's, Framingham; Trinity, Haverhill, (170) ; the Redeemer, Holliston (25), now revived; Christ Church, Hyde Park (78) ; Grace Church and St. John's, Lawrence, with 165 and 84 communicants. Lawrence was then already head- ing to be the chief seat of woolen manufacturing in the country. English immigrants from Yorkshire rather than Lancashire were to swell Episcopal numbers.
A tripling of communicants, a doubling of parishes and clergy, and an even larger financial expansion were the marks of the East- burn episcopate. A theological change was also in the air. The Griswold administration marked the steady advance of the old Evangelicals in New England - an advance that continued for some- time in the days of Bishop Eastburn. With his death in 1872, the Evangelical tide had definitely turned, at least in the north. Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine of Ohio passed away shortly before Eastburn. Bishop Burgess of Maine had died in 1866. By 1870, Bishop Thomas M. Clark, like Phillips Brooks, was proclaiming the new Evangel- icalism instead of the old. The last two Presiding Bishops of the old Evangelical persuasion, Benjamin B. Smith of Kentucky (1868- 84) and Alfred Lee of Delaware (1884-87) were shortly to pass on. Stephen H. Tyng, possibly the chief of the many powerful preachers of the Movement, resigned his enormous parish of St. George's, New York, in 1878. Bishop Eastburn's passing was the prophecy of the gradual end of the old Evangelicalism, with its key doctrine that salvation by faith meant emotional conversion.
Bishop Eastburn seems to have been aware that the theological currents of the day were not running in what he deemed the right direction. His head-on encounter with the stubborn Anglo- Catholicism of the parish of the Advent in Boston we have already
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mentioned. Many of his theological remarks in his Convention Addresses would seem to be aimed at what he considered to be rationalistic and un-Scriptural ideas on the doctrine of the Atone- ment. The Atonement was substitutionary; Christ was punished for us.
In the Bishop's 1870 Convention Address, we have the gist of his theology: "Preach with fullness and preach with distinctness, such as none can mistake, the justification of the sinner through the righteousness of Christ, dying on the Cross as our Substitute and Surety, this is a revelation made to us. And yet this fundamental truth of the Atonement is now, by a certain school, explained away, the precise method by which Christ saves us is covered up in a dreary mist; our guilt and tribulation through sin are lightly touched, or kept out of sight; divine love is put prominently forward to the detriment of divine justice ; and by representations as illogical as they are unscriptural, the people are taught, not in the way point- ed out by our formularies, and by the Bible, that we are benefited by the Redeemer's sufferings and death. My brethren, let there be no vagueness on this point, as we would avoid bloodguiltiness be- fore God. Now this doctrine of our deliverance from wrath for the sake of the everlasting satisfaction made by the everlasting Son of God is the distinctly expressed doctrine of our Articles, our liturgy, and all our standards; and in no part of the Prayer Book more clearly than in our Communion Office."
Bishop Eastburn could hardly have suspected that one of his young clergy, Alexander Viets Griswold Allen, professor in the Cambridge Episcopal Theological School, was even then coming to conclusions later to be published in a notable book, "The Continuity of Christian Thought," in which he sharply distinguished between the theology of the Greek Fathers and Latin theology as permeated by St. Augustine's doctrine of the total depravity of man, a doctrine to be the fundamental tenet later of John Calvin and Martin Luther. Another young clergyman, Phillips Brooks, was even then preaching that the main purpose of the Incarnation was not to find the penal substitute for human sin, but rather to bring light and life to the sons of men. In brief, Greek theology and the Greek liturgies have revolved around the Incarnation, Romanism and classic Protestant- ism around the Atonement; the new preaching followed the Greeks.
The attempts to elect a new bishop after Eastburn's death make clear enough that the Diocese, though it respected and loved its bishop, did not want another like him. The voting, undoubtedly, would have seemed to Eastburn like the deliverance of his darling diocese to the power of the dog. For, in two Conventions, the eminent Evangelical rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston, Alexander H. Vinton, was unable to secure more than a third of the clerical and parochial votes. Worse still, an incipient "rationalist" like Henry Codman Potter, later to be bishop in New York, had a sizable following, and worst of all, James DeKoven, the noted Anglo-
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